Arts & Events

The title role in 'Othello'' has been performed by black actors since Ira Aldridge--son of a freeman minister, born in New York City in 1807, with a career onstage there by the 1820s, though it was only after moving to London that he played Othello, where he was praised by Edmund Kean, first in selected scenes, then the play in 1833; later touring Europe and Russia, fathering opera singers and dying in Poland, where he's buried. Perhaps the most famous black performer who took the role--and took it around the world--was the great Paul Robeson, whose Broadway version ran from 1943-45. Studio and radio recordings with photographs of Robeson as Othello as well as commenting on it are on YouTube. -more-

Shinichi Iova-Koga and Edward Schocker--both associated with Mills College, Iova-Koga teaching dance composition and alumnus Schocker, founder of the Music for People & Thingamajigs Festival there--will perform collaboratively for the first time in their original show, 'Drowning Man,' 8 p. m. Friday the 16th and saturday the 17th only at NohSpace, 2840 Mariposa Street at Florida (between Harrison & Bryant) in Project Artaud, Mission-Potrero District, San Francisco. -more-

Next weekend's Bay Area screenings of 'Samuel Fuller: A Fuller Life,' a new documentary by his daughter on the Hollywood maverick filmmaker admired by a gamut of younger peers--from Godard to Wim Wenders, Scorsese to Jim Jarmusch to Tarantino--have become the occasion for a kind of mini-fest of 10 of Fuller's films, including a newly-discovered and restored director's cut of 'Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street,' shot in Germany and scarcely shown in America when released in a shorter form in 1973, a German documentary on the making of 'Dead Pigeon' ('Return to Beethoven Street') released last year, as well as a few classics and rarities--and the personal appearances of Fuller's widow and collaborator, actress and writer Christa Lang-Fuller and their daughter Samantha, author of the documentary on her father.

The screenings and appearances will take place over three days, Friday, September 23 through Sunday the 25th, at the Roxie Theater in San Francisco's Mission District and at the Smith Rafael Film Center in San Rafael. -more-